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misfortune as a crime against society. | gether, lying for the most part on the At a time when in France, Italy, Germa- bare boards. They all ate, slept, and ny, Spain, and the Low Countries, no dressed in this miserable hole, though debtor could be lodged in prison for in many cases the only crime they had more than a year and a day, during committed was that of having failed in which period his effects were realized business. In the open yard a pulpit and distributed among his creditors had been erected, but without any and further, at a time when in those shelter for the congregation. So noisome lands no gentleman, or man of quality, was the stench of this place that the could be arrested for debt, his property prisoners' friends and relations were abalone, with the exception of his arms, solutely afraid to visit them. wearing-apparel, and furniture for one. bedchamber, being held answerable and liable to seizure-at such a time, no matter what a man's rank, position, or means might be, he could in England be suddenly arrested on a fabricated charge and thrown into a filthy jail among the worst criminals and the vilest refuse of a brutal population. Prisoners for debt were then-in the reign of that monarch by right divine, Charles II.-treated in almost every respect as felons, and were even denied the privilege of hearing divine service and the preaching of God's word.

Under the Commonwealth, Sir John Lenthall presented to the committee appointed to inquire into the state of the Upper Bench Prison a list of the prisoners in custody on the 3d May, 1654. From this we learn that several debtors had been kept in confinement since the year 1640, one from 1633, one from 1631, and one from so far back as 1616. There were in all 393 inmates of the jail, and all, with three or four exceptions, for debt. The sums for which they were confined varied from £6 to £100,000, amounting in the whole to £976,122. The debtors who owed the largest amounts lived for the most part in the Rules, where they were enabled to indulge in a certain sort of squalid and sensual luxury. Among these were Ferdinando, Earl of Huntington, and several knights and persons of distinction. Those who could not afford to pay the enormous fees exacted for the privilege of living outside the walls, literally rotted, body and soul, within the prison-house.

According to a pamphlet published by Humphry Gyffard in 1670, the Holeward of the Poultry Compter, which did not exceed twenty feet square, contained from forty to fifty prisoners, male and female, who all pigged to

A vivid picture of the miseries endured by the inmates of the Fleet Prison in 1729 is furnished in a petition addressed to the Duke of Dorset by his old school-fellow Samuel Byrom, who describes himself as "late of Byrom and Par, in the County Palatine of Lancaster." This unfortunate gentleman asks, with natural vehemence, "What barbarity can be greater than for jailers (without any provocation) to load prisoners with irons, and thrust them into dungeons, and manacle them, and deny their friends to visit them, and force them to pay excessive fines for their chamber-rent, their victuals and drink; to open their letters and seize the charity that is sent them ?" And when debtors had succeeded in arranging with their creditors, hundreds were detained in prison for chamber-rent and other unjust demands put forth by the jailers, so that at last in their despair very many were driven to commit suicide. Mr. Byrom suggests that the jailers should be paid a fixed salary, and forbidden, under pain of instant dismissal, to accept bribe, fee, or reward of any kind. He also shrewdly remarks, that the law of imprisonment for debt inflicts a greater loss on the country, in the way of wasted power and energies, than do monasteries and nunneries in foreign lands and among Roman Catholic peoples. Having come to grief himself for a considerable amount, he is rather disposed to look down upon the smaller fry who have become involved in the meshes of the same net, and is therefore of opinion that large debtors are better entitled to their discharge than those who owe only some paltry sum quite beneath the notice of a man of quality. "Holland," he says, "the most unpolite country in the world, uses debtors with mildness and malefactors with rigor; England, on the contrary, shows mercy

to murtherers and robbers, but of poor debtors impossibilities are demanded. It would be more feasible for me," he continues, "to wash a blackamoor white than to pay my debts; and must I be starved to death and kept in prison for no other reason but because I am a gentleman and had once an estate; when an insignificant fellow shall have his liberty who has done more real injury by his small debts than I have done by my great debts? for what he owes is to poor families that he has ruined; but what I owe is to the rich, who perchance have defrauded me and drawn me into inconveniences."

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great and good man wrote that the act of 32 George II., generally known as the Lords' Act, which compelled creditors to allow fourpence a day to their imprisoned debtors, was nothing better than a dead letter. Throughout all England and Wales, with the exception of Middlesex and Surrey, there were not a dozen prisoners who had derived any benefit from it. In the course of a single journey he came upon six hundred debtors, whose individual debts were under £20 each, while a considerable proportion did not rise above three to four pounds. In the latter case, the expense of suing for the aliment money Without adopting Mr. Byrom's inge- was often equal to the original claim. nious but illogical proposition, it may At Carlisle, out of forty-nine persons, safely be admitted that gentlemen sup- only one received his daily groat, the posed to be possessed of means were consequence being that the majority frequently arrested, less than a hundred were nearly starved. Even water was years ago, with a view to extort from doled out in many jails in the most their fears what could not be obtained sparing manner-three pints a day befrom their sense of justice. We may going considered sufficient for all yet farther than this; for it is not to be doubted that many innocent men were seized in the public streets without the slightest claim or right. A Mr. Farley, who wrote an essay on imprisoners. ment for debt in the year 1795, mentions a case in point that came under his own cognizance. A low attorney whispered one day to one of his understrappers that he could put £100 in his pocket, if he would do as he was desired. The other having readily assented, the well-assorted pair followed to his inn a country gentleman whose name was known to the attorney. The understrapper now made affidavit that this gentleman owed him the sum of £3000, upon which the attorney immediately had him arrested and carried off to a lock-up house. No bail being procurable, the victim applied to a judge, who replied that he could not interfere, and that things must take their usual course. Disheartened and driven to despair, the gentleman sent for the alleged plaintiff's attorney, and obtained his discharge by the payment of £200.

But no one who has glanced ever so hurriedly over the writings of that immortal philanthropist, John Howard, can need to be told of the inhuman treatment to which poor debtors were subjected even so late as the latter part of the last century. In 1777 that truly

During the previous year there were 2437 persons confined for debt in the prisons of England and Wales, as against 994 felons and 653 petty offend

Of the number of small debtors, some idea may be formed from the fact that one society alone, that which met at the Thatched House, liberated, in the decade between 1772 and 1782, no fewer than 7196 prisoners, who were thus restored to 4328 wives and 13,126 children.

The description given by the same. philanthropist of the state of the London and Westminster jails twelve years after this, and after the attention of the legislature had been drawn to the subject, is truly sickening. Men and women, debtors and felons, were all huddled together indiscriminately; and in many prisons the daily allowance of food was only one penny-loaf, which then weighed from 104 to 11 ounces. In the Marshalsea prison there was one old man confined for a debt of £10 4s., due to a cowkeeper, and who had been there since January, 1784, his detaining creditor all the while paying the weekly allowance of 2s. 4d., or £6 1s. 4d. per annum for four years and a half. The terrible severity of the English laws against debt at that time cannot be justified by any reference to any general want of sensibility that characterized that age, for on the Continent far

greater humanity was displayed towards the unfortunate. In Holland there were few debtors; because, writes John Howard, "the magistrates do not approve of confining in idleness any that may be usefully employed." Creditors were required to pay aliment-money at the rate of 5 to 18 stivers per week, according to the debtor's previous position in life. If this allowance fell into arrears for more than eight days, the debt was cancelled and the debtor set free. One, and probably the true, reason assigned for the paucity of debtors in Holland was the excellence of the industrial training imparted to the children. In Bremen there was a debtors' jail, but no debtor; and over the portal was inscribed the appropriate motto, "Hic, fraudum terminus esto." At Hamburg, again, a commercial city with a population of 90,000 souls, there was in 1781 only one prisoner for debt. In Hanover, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Prussia, imprisonment for such a cause rarely took place; and the same might be said of France, where the detaining creditor had not only to pay in advance an alimentary allowance of nine shillings a month, but also to defray all costs of arrest and to cover all expenses incurred by his debtor's sickness or death. In Russia the case was different. There, as in England, indebtedness was punished as a criminal offence. Insolvent debtors were often employed by the government as slaves, but were allowed a small sum for their labor, which went towards the liquidation of their liabilities. Private persons likewise hired debtor-prisoners as slaves, but were answerable for their due appearance when called for. In prison their condition was sufficiently pitiable; their maintenance depending almost entirely on the alms dropped by passers-by into little boxes placed out

side; for the government undertook to supply only the prison and fuel. The Empress Catharine, however, introduced a salutary change in this respect, and forbade imprisonment for small debts contracted independent of trade. At present no debtor can be detained in prison longer than five years under any circumstances.

Indeed, in all European countries the feeling towards insolvent debtors has always been more humane and consid

erate than in liberal and benevolent England. By all means let severe and prompt punishment overtake the fraudulent debtor; but to punish misfortune is an unprofitable cruelty. No doubt the laws have of late years been considerably mitigated; nor is the condition of debtors in jail such as to call forth any very strong expressions of horror and indignation. Still the question recurs, for whose benefit are they confined at all? According to Montesquieu, every punishment which does not arise from absolute necessity is an act of tyranny; and there is surely no absolute necessity for punishing a man because he is unable to make certain payments on a certain day. It may be that there are some few individuals over whom the fear of imprisonment exercises a restraining influence, but these form a very small minority; and, as far as trades-people are concerned, recourse to a less indiscriminate system of giving credit to every welldressed and plausible adventurer will be found far more efficacious than the terrors of a jail. Besides, as the Marquis Beccaria truly observes, commerce and property are not the end of the social compact, but the means of attaining that end. Men are, after all, more to be valued than money; and moral deterioration is attended by far more serious consequences than pecuniary losses. "The misery suffered in jails is not half their evil; they are filled with every sort of corruption that poverty and wickedness can generate, with all the shameless and profligate enormities that can be produced by the imprudence of ignominy, the rage of want, and the malignity of despair. In a prison the check of the public eye is removed, and the power of the law is spent. There are no fearsthere are no blushes. The lewd inflame the more modest; the audacious harden the timid. Every one fortifies himself as best he can against his own remaining sensibility; endeavoring to practice on others the arts that are practiced on himself, and to gain the applause of his worst associates by imitating their manners." This picture is by no means overdrawn. Every reader of this Magazine will probably remember some one acquaintance who was ruined for ever by the feeling of social degradation induced by no matter how brief a period

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of incarceration. Society suffers by the moral deterioration of its most insignificant member far more than it gains by the arbitrary enforcement of a moneylender's bond, or even of a tradesman's bill. These can protect themselves without the aid of the jailer, except in cases of deliberate fraud; and with regard to large commercial operations, it rarely happens that a bankrupt has any cause to fear imprisonment for simple debt. The most specious argument in favor of the perpetuation of this barbarous usage is, that it serves to check the improvidence of the industrial classes. But it does nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it enables them to obtain credit when otherwise they would be required to pay ready-money, and thereby encourages them to adopt habits of comparative recklessness and extravagance to which they would otherwise be strangers. For these and many other yet stronger reasons, it is devoutly to be wished that the present generation may live to see the utter repudiation of the old Roman maxim, that whoso cannot pay in money shall pay with his per

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A SMALL Collection of Dutch masterpieces, which Mr. Walter of Bearwood has kindly sent, for the public benefit, to the South Kensington Museum, affords so good an opportunity for returning to the question how the nineteenth century should fairly judge the seventeenth, that we are glad to take advantage of it. This question is one which, within the last fifteen or twenty years, has been not a little debated in England, where the Flemish school has long held what we are now inclined to call a traditionalperhaps a factitious-place in the estimate of connoisseurs; and it has, besides, this peculiar interest for us, that in its two main subjects-landscape and common life-the school coincides with the direction of our own art. What we have mainly added to it, in regard to classes of subject, is our picture of Incident sentimental, satirical, or quasihistorical. And the almost total non

appearance of this element in the works of the Dutch painters accords, it will be found, with those leading characteristics of their style on which we wish to dwell. Before passing to our criticism, let us, however, note that the Bearwood collec tion contains a few works of other origin. To the early German belongs a very careful and thoroughly painted portrait-group of two young ladies, by Lucas von Cranach. The girls are stiffly enough disposed, and the tightfitting dresses of black and crimson, much enriched with gold, in which they are encased, add to the singularity of the design; but they have a great look of truth, and the details are beautifully finished. Their rings alone would furnish an excellent model for jewelry. A delicate and thoughtful figure of a man, with light hair and brown eyes, is asscribed to Albert Dürer. It has a strong likeness to those poetical portrait-heads well known to the admirers of his etchings, although the making out of the features and hands exhibits less firmness and precision than might have been anticipated. And two little so-called religious pictures represent the period when. Sassoferrato and Albano were treated as great artists-a position which, with several others, they mainly owed to their place as ultimi Romanorum, latest in a series which includes Giotto and Leonardo.

As these painters seem to us to have been overrated from the fact of their ending a mighty school, so we are inclined to think that the Dutch have gained in a like way from beginning one. When we reflect how much pleasure of high order and enduring quality the European world has received from landscape and from representations of ordinary human life, it is natural to feel a strong interest in those who, though unconsciously and imperfectly, introduced us to these pleasant regions. Yet if, forgetful that they were but novices taking uncertain steps, connoisseurs give them the praise due only to complete art, or presume to set these "old masters" above the far finer artists who, in France, Belgium, and England, have painted man and nature, a protest is due against such exaggeration. As an example of this, we may take the learned Dr. Waagen, who prefers Isaac Ostade to Turner, because the latter has not

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that "juicy impasto," that "marrowy demonstration in the auction-room. Tur execution" (to quote the horrid jargon ner has painted, and Modern Painters of the thorough-bred connoisseur,) of has gone through several editions, yet which a fine specimen will be found Hobbima and Ruysdael have not, we are amongst the Bearwood collection. It is assured, fallen in that interesting marenough to stir the wrath of a man of ket of which Messrs. Christie and Mantaste when, after reading the Doctor's son have long and honorably officiated dicta, he looks at such bough or cloud as the presiding Ediles. drawing, such dingy water and confused figure groups, as this picture shows, and compares Isaac Ostade with Turner. But it is not in this spirit that we can fairly judge these early masters. Useful as that famous comparison, "Has Claude done this?" may be to check the fanaticism of mere connoisseurship, to consider only how great our advance has been would afford but a partial criticism on the earliest landscape and common life painters. It will be more fair to try to judge them by the light of their own age; although our pleasure in their works, as distinct from our critical judgment, must ultimately depend in great measure on whether we think of them as inventors or as novices-whether we reflect only upon the "Dutch school" in antithesis to the religious and classical style which preceded it, or ask how far later genius has developed the style then initiated. People in the last century, and those in this who were formed under their influence, took the former point of view. It was, indeed, natural to judge so when real landscape and common life had been generally abandoned by art. This was the golden time of the Dutch school, of which we may in England select his Majesty George IV. as the most characteristic patron. That over-admiration should be followed by a counter-current of feeling was natural, and every one knows the brilliancy and power of the protest which it called forth from Mr. Ruskin. Yet that his appeal to the younger masters from the old-supported though it was, not only by a vast array of unanswerable facts, but by the general conviction of modern artists themselves, and of the present generation of spectators has not yet altogether prevailed over the elder faith, we may find proof in such a book as Dr. Waagen's laborious Art Treasures of England. And those who think the Doctor much more distinguished for abundance of learning than of taste may discover a more convincing

Sensible as we are of the weight of Mr. Ruskin's criticism, and convinced that the rapid production of excellent modern landscape and figure pictures in France and England will of itself ïnevitably redress over-admiration of the old, there is still much, if we calmly consider it, to explain, and, in its degree, to justify the value once assigned to it. First in this scale we place the technical excellence of the Dutch artists, from whom we here, of course, exclude Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyke. There is simply no such palpable sunshine as Cuyp's. There is no such_permeating daylight as De Hooghe's. Teniers, that sovereign of superficiality, has a lightness of touch, a power of putting in things at once, which, like that occasional breadth of handling in Jan Steen which Reynolds pronounced worthy of Raffaelle, places him high amongst painters as such. Neither Jan Steen nor Teniers is seen to the best advantage in the Bearwood collection, and Cuyp is only represented there (we think) by his inferior imitators-Both, with his burntsienna foliage, and Van Stry, whose emptily-modelled surface and harshness of outline detract seriously from the merit of the fine golden tones of his atmosphere. Nor can we deny that two or three of the De Hooghes at the Hague and Amsterdam, with that masterpiece which Lord Ashburton possesses, bear out our remark more completely than Mr. Walter's "Garden Scene." Yet here the truth of relative tone in the château which occupies the centre of the canvas fairly deserves the epithet of marvellous; and there is a kind of restless transparency in the sky, a finish and brilliancy of tint about the figures (a grave cavalier playing at bowls, and other persons watching the game), which English art has rarely rivalled. A little interior, where a servant brings in a tray of fish to her aged mistress, who turns from her work to examine the question of dinner, is an

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